pulp fiction

JOAN SMITH

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, July 19, 1998

Fame and romantic love have this in common: They are the idealization of another, the surrender of power and the assignment of perfection. They create a vortex so enormous it seems to draw all strength and reason from the best of us. Yet we find them thrilling, and hold them among life's most gracious blessings. Scott Spencer has always written beautifully about romantic obsession. Endless Love, a wonderful novel that was made into a terrible movie, begins with a young boy setting his girlfriend's family's house on fire, hoping only that they will allow him into their lives again. In Waking the Dead, an aspiring politician is so obsessed with his murdered wife he seems to call her to life. The protagonist of Men in Black, a writer whose made-up book about aliens becomes a bestseller and taps into one kind of obsession, is himself preoccupied with his living wife, yet fails her repeatedly. Now, Spencer has invoked both fame and love in a novel based loosely on the life of Bob Dylan. In The Rich Man's Table (Knopf), a young man tells about the day his mother confessed that a hugely famous folk singer turned pop star, Luke Fairchild, is his father, and how he spends the rest of his life learning everything he can about the man, interviewing everyone who has ever been close to him, traveling to concerts, trying to see him and persuade him to acknowledge their relationship. During a recent interview at a coffee shop next door to his Manhattan apartment building, Spencer said that he wanted to write about someone "larger than life. I've never had the chance to do what Homer did, writing about warriors, or what Shakespeare did, writing about kings. So I was interested in exploring the modern equivalent. I wanted somebody whose circumstances would be pulling him away from normal life, someone for whom every bit of the solace a normal life might bring would be something he'd have to struggle for. Someone who was like a king." Yet Spencer's story of Luke Fairchild/Dylan is hardly an heroic epic. From the unsubtle photo of a Dylan look-alike on the book jacket to the caricaturish literary portrait of the famous man, The Rich Man's Table is pure parody. And while the book begins with a beautifully drawn sketch of two fatherless boys playing a game of accosting men in the street, pretending to recognize their dads, even the illegitimate son, after the revelation of his true paternity, becomes the cartoon image of an obsessed fan.

"I knew right away that I wanted the story to be told by someone who was or imagined himself to be this man's son," says Spencer. "Then I realized pretty early on that the book would function as a kind of mock memoir. This is a book pretending to be one of those books written by a celebrity's offspring, which is a real genre in the late 20th century, from Mommy, Dearest to the books just published by Peter Fonda and Humphrey Bogart's kid."

What Spencer captures best in The Rich Man's Table is the power (and, conversely, the absurdity) of both fame and unrequited longing. Fame and romantic love both have the effect of magnifying the ordinary, the way lights magnify Javanese shadow puppets, the way giant video screens in a ballpark magnify small gestures of the game. But there is also a way in which the projector reduces its subject, flattens it, robs it of anything like a self. It's what the Hopi Indians must mean when they talk about photographers stealing their souls. So when Fairchild's ordinary feelings show up in the lyrics of songs, subject to the analysis of any interested stranger, they lose their meaning. And because Fairchild is just a story, a projection, anything he does can be forgiven, because his fame - the story - is more important than he is, just as romantic love can eclipse the beloved. The object's behavior attains so much significance it doesn't matter at all. Love and fame make us as stupid as the fans who pour onto a freeway to surround the ambulance in which Fairchild is trying to take his son's mother to the hospital. She dies, the mother who has been his only parent, but the son seems not to mind much. He has found his father, whatever that might mean so many years after the fact. He has achieved proximity, however precarious, to the object of his longing. Spencer says that he "worked in the movie business for a while, so I got to see a little bit of what fame on that level is like, and I just imagined the rest. The texture and the incidents just sort of presented themselves as I went along." He says that the idea of longing for a father, of fatherlessness, probably interested him because he has such a good relationship with his own. "It's how the novelist's imagination works, that you take what you have and you're interested in the shadow of the thing more than the thing itself." Spencer, who was born in Washington, D.C., in 1945 and grew up in Chicago, says he wrote his first novel when he was 9, "about a horse that was captured by the Nazis and pressed into military service in the desert, and then runs away from the Nazis and is rescued by an American film company making something like a foreign legion movie out there." The horse becomes a movie star and, presumably, lives happily ever after. "It was published and made into a film," Spencer deadpans.

"I think I was encouraged by my parents to be bookish. They thought writing was a good thing; it was the only thing I was ever praised for. Nothing else ever worked out for me, and I mean nothing. My dad worked in a factory; he was a steelworker in Chicago. And my mom did a number of things until I was in high school, when she became a real estate agent. My mom was not a stay-at-home mom. I was America's first latchkey kid." His parents encouraged him to read and he did. "I loved the John R. Tunis baseball books - The Kid from Tomkinsville, The Kid Comes Back. Those were boy's books, but then I crossed over, to everyone's horror, and started reading girl's books. The one I remember best was called Janitor's Daughter, and it was about a girl who lived in the basement of an apartment building with her father, who was a janitor, and the incredible shame she felt over her lack of status and how she learns that her Dad is as good as anybody else and she's as good as anybody else. It was incredibly embarrassing, because the library in our neighborhood was completely Balkanized between girl's books and boy's books, and I had to go to a new shelf to get this. But I couldn't deny that there was a lot of stuff going on in those books that interested me. They were love stories and personal stories that weren't being told in the boy's books, which were about surviving and winning and sports." Spencer says he still loves books that deal with the psychological, but that he has tried to combine the personal with the epic, the novel of ideas.

"I like a certain pulpiness in a novel," he says.

"Things that deal with dramatic and even melodramatic situations. I've felt for a long time that the love story, for instance, has been abandoned by serious writers and left in the hands of not very good writers. And I've been interested in recapturing that territory and bringing it back where it belongs." Spencer's novels often invoke the causes and effects of childhood, and he says he likes reading Freud, that he admires "the bravery he had in writing that stuff in a world where he was considered mad and grisly and obsessed in all the wrong ways.

"I don't think many people would call themselves Freudians anymore, but I do think that childhood sets the stage," he adds. "It's like history in the sense that what happens before determines what happens next; there is not an infinite number of choices from every starting point, so that where you start narrows your choices, begins to define your field. Denying the importance of childhood would be like denying the importance of history." He studied English at the University of Wisconsin and says he did not like high school. "It was my job not to like high school. I didn't like high school so that I might be happy later on in life." He dropped out of college twice, the first time to go to San Francisco with three friends in a drive-away car.

"One of my friends had an uncle he claimed was the owner of the Fairmont, and we all had visions of this guy letting us stay at the hotel. Unfortunately, the guy never seemed to be at home to my friend's phone calls, so we ended up in this cramped little apartment at Leavenworth and California that always smelled of gas. It was the parapsychology district - there were more mediums and palm readers in that neighborhood than I'd ever seen in my life. People from all over The City would come there to talk to the dead.

"So I worked at all these scrappy little jobs to pay our tiny rent and lived on boiled rice and oranges, which, come to think of it, is a pretty healthy diet. And I spent hours and hours every day at the main branch of the public library, where I did probably 20 percent of the reading I've done in my whole life." The second time he left school, Spencer drifted from Maine to Boston to Europe, "just restless. By the time I went back to school it was already 1968, and it was very, very hot and confrontational. I had no choice but to get involved, because it was taking place in my neighborhood. I went out to get groceries one day and came back to some rioting students using my kitchen as a Molotov cocktail factory. I liked the passion, I liked the action. It was the endless conversations about fine points of theory that drove me out." He never studied writing formally, but says that he

"learned by doing. I think that when I started reading novels that were less than great, that did not bring you to your knees in awe, it made me feel that this was something a human being could do and that I could do it. I remember reading, in college, an assigned book by Andre Gide called The Counterfeiters, which is not a bad book, but if I'd been reading nothing but Tolstoy or Nabokov I would never have been able to write a word." He'd always wanted to write, and "by the time I finished school I realized that I was not developing a second choice, I did not have a fallback position. And I wanted to go to New York because I considered it, at the time, the mecca of American intelligence." He married a woman from New York - "I thought you had to do that, like getting a green card. It was sort of a college marriage and didn't last long." And he had his first novel, Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball, published when he was 28. It is very funny, a moral tale about a lonely, unappealing professor who answers a classified ad for a new job and is kidnapped and hired to work and live at an isolated plant where top-secret brain research is being done on thousands of ordinary unsuspecting citizens.

"My inspiration," says Spencer, "was second-tier Nabokov, a novel called Despair. It's a very funny novel, I recommend it highly. Calling it second-tier is not quite accurate, it's almost first-tier. I just thought it would be funny to create a narrator and have the reader know much more about what is going on in the story than he does, and I wasn't ready to write anything personal yet. Also, I was interested in brains and that sort of mechanistic, non-Freudian psychology, the ways in which the brain determines psychology. It took me a couple of years to write because I had a lot of energy but not that much time, because I had to work at whatever I could get my hands on - mostly office jobs around New York." Spencer says that seeing his first novel in print was

"probably the greatest pleasure I've had in publishing. I was raised in a poor and somewhat culturally isolated neighborhood. All of my friends were the sons of cops and bus drivers, and I'd never met a published writer. So it seemed a rather remote possibility that I could become one, and when I decided to try to be a writer I was way too shy to tell people. When my book was published, I felt I could just declare myself." But it was his second novel, Preservation Hall, about a happily married man whose dream house in Maine - and whose pleasant life, joyous marriage - is invaded by a kind of terror in the shape of his troublesome father's new son-in-law, that set the tone for the rest of his work.

"It was not that different from anything I've written since," says Spencer. "I'm always interested in that idea of being aware of your fate as an individual and trying to balance that awareness against your awareness of your part in a larger story. What's good for you and what's good for everybody else and the difference between those things." And if that obsessive awareness seems almost the definition of the big novel, Spencer says he finds "that novelists are obsessive types. We spend so much time focusing on characters we make up, what they're going to do next, what they would wear, what they would say, and getting confused about whether we made them up or whether they really exist - it's almost the essence of obsession." So that obsession, in a way, is not so very different from a necessary attention - the kind of attention one cultivates in developing any skill, in meditation and prayer. As Spencer describes it, he does not really decide to write the things he writes. "Things just come up and get my attention. I don't wonder what I'm going to take on next. It's not an intellectual process. I just stay by the pond and something breaks the surface. There's so much down there."